The steel doors of the Vatican open onto the smallest sovereign state on Earth, home to a thousand citizens within a hundred acres. For over a century, the kingdom and then the Republic of Italy has surrounded this tiny independent state. We think of the Pope today as a spiritual leader, but behind St. Peter’s, in the quiet courtyards and offices, walk clerics who are part of an international diplomatic network.
We expect the Vatican to exert diplomatic pressure, not to go to war with its hundred Swiss guards. But those guards are the decorative remnant of an army of several thousand Swiss mercenaries who once fought real battles for the Popes, defending the Papal States—the large area in central Italy over which the Popes claimed full political authority. When the keys of St. Peter flew on the Papal banner at the head of a hired army, it was clear that the Pope in those days was a prince as much as a prelate.
In the 14th century, the Popes adopted their characteristic triple crown and built a palace that emphasized their princely worldliness. It’s at Avignon in France. Seven Popes in succession were French, and they preferred to live there as absentee landlords of the Papal States, sending out armies to fight on their behalf. The palace they built looks like a fortified castle.
Soon, their armies would be fighting not only against other princes, but even against other Popes, quite literally. Rome resented not having an Italian Pope. After much confusion and rival elections, there was an embarrassing result: a Pope in Rome and a Pope in Avignon, each claiming the other was a fraud. A council was called, and it deposed both Popes and elected a third.
But no one could persuade the other two to stand down. So then there were three, each with his own college of cardinals and massive bureaucracy. To add to this, there were ugly rumors about the private lives of the Popes. One had been accused of fornication, heresy, corruption, blasphemy, and the murder of the previous Pope.
Another would be charged with sodomy, fornication, corruption, and murder. Little seemed to be changing in Papal affairs, except for one crucial thing: more and more people were protesting that the Popes had betrayed Jesus Christ and therefore had lost their authority to speak as his representative on Earth. One of the first to make his voice heard was John Wycliffe in England. He wrote about the blasphemy of the Pope, calling the Popes “limbs of Satan, men glowing with satanic pride.
” He had an equally low opinion of the cardinals, calling them “incarnate devils, the hinges of Satan’s house. ” But Wycliffe was not merely disturbed by the character of the Popes. He resented their spiritual authority, claiming that there was only one true authority: the scriptures. On the other side of Europe, in the Bohemian capital of Prague, Wycliffe’s words found a powerful echo.
His manuscripts had been brought to Prague in 1401 by a Czech scholar, Jerome, who had copied them in Oxford. It’s one of those occasions where books are like time bombs. Wycliffe was already dead almost 30 years, but his ideas struck far more of a spark here than they ever had in England. In Prague’s central square, there’s a statue of the man who developed Wycliffe’s ideas and died for them: Jan Hus.
Hus was already preaching along very similar lines in what was known as the Bethlehem Chapel. This chapel would greatly have impressed Wycliffe, who believed in the use of a language that people could understand. It was founded in 1391 specifically for the preaching of sermons in the Czech language. The central feature here was not an altar, but the pulpit from which Hus and others preached.
On the wall, there were Czech texts written with music above for people to sing, hymn books for the congregation. The way the people here felt about the papacy was made clear in other paintings on the walls. The humility of Christ, who washed the feet of his disciples, was contrasted with the pride of the Popes. Christ threw the money changers out of the temple.
So what would he have thought of the wealthiest splendor of the Popes? And now, to make matters worse, there were three such Popes at one time. At last, the Emperor Sigismund called a council to deal with the matter. Hus was summoned to attend to explain himself.
His friends said, “Don’t go. ” But Sigismund personally guaranteed his safety. And so, with great courage, he set off. He should have been warned by the great clock in the central square in Prague.
Every hour, the 12 apostles come on parade. Everyone approved of them, but that was about all the two sides had in common. The papacy regarded Hus as a heretic, and the penalty for that was death. Hus accused the Popes of deadly sins, vanity, and avarice.
And if there were three Popes, well, Hus would deny them thrice. But the cock crows thrice for betrayal. Hus, trusting the emperor, should have been warned. The Emperor Sigismund insisted on the council being held outside Italy.
This lakeside town of Constance, in the very south of Germany, was his choice. People came here in 1414 from all over Europe, as many as 70,000 of them. There were clergy supporting their favorite Pope, ambassadors from distant kings, merchants, and just people here for the occasion. It was the last great medieval gathering.
There were tournaments to amuse the ladies, and in the cathedral, you could make your confession in any of 12 different languages. Luckily for us, a local citizen, Ulrich Richental, recorded the remarkable events that happened in his city between 1414 and 1418. His chronicle was profusely illustrated, showing the city getting ready for its greatest occasion. The bakers couldn’t cope with the numbers, so portable ovens were brought in.
The butchers worked overtime, and the fishmongers even provided snails and frogs for any foreign visitors with such exotic tastes. Only one of the three rival Popes, Pope John, bothered, or perhaps dared, to come to the council. The crowds gathered to receive his rather dubious blessing, and he graciously handed out candles to the faithful. John soon lost the limelight and never regained it.
Through the great Rhine Gate rode the Emperor Sigismund on Christmas Day, 1414. The pageant made its way through the streets of Constance to the doors of the cathedral, where the opening sessions of the council were held. Sigismund attempted to put all the earlier excitement over Pope John into proper perspective. He staged a theatrical ceremony in which he as emperor would receive the homage of the papacy, or at least a third of it.
The previous month, at the other end of the town and with very much less pomp, the lonely figure of Jan Hus had arrived on his trek from Prague. He managed to find lodgings with a widow at this house. Hus was prepared to defend his ideas against anyone, and he did so with considerable spirit. He would recant, he said, if the Council could prove him wrong from the scriptures.
But the bishops were more concerned with his defiance of the church. His promise of safe conduct was brushed aside, and he was thrown into prison. Hus was held in a cell at the top of a small tower, today part of a bedroom in Constance’s best hotel. The Council tried to prove him a heretic, accusing him of various theological errors which in fact he didn’t hold.
But behind it all, there remained one inescapable clash: Hus did not accept the authority of an unworthy pope or of corrupt priests, or of a church which he believed had become more interested in politics than in Christ. Although the emperor had personally guaranteed Hus’s safety, it was only a matter of time before he was condemned as a heretic. And once condemned, there was only one penalty. Hus was burnt.
The council also ordered that Wycliffe, dead for 40 years, should be dug up from his English grave, his skeleton broken and burnt, and his ashes tipped into the nearby river. But Wycliffe’s supporters claimed that as the river flowed to the oceans, so his ashes, like those of Hus which were thrown into the Rhine, had now been spread through the entire world. But it was still a world which had three Popes. At Constance, a new hall was built for the choosing of a new Pope.
The three existing ones were formally deposed, including Pope John, and the cardinals gathered to elect another. On the 11th of November, 1417, the rafters rang with shouts of acclamation. The announcement was displayed: “Habemus Papam. ” We have a Pope.
An Italian who would reign as Martin V. But as the people knelt in homage, there was still one problem: the new Pope wasn’t yet even a priest. So on successive days, he was first made deacon, then ordained a priest, and consecrated bishop, until with a universal sigh of relief, he received the papal crown. And so the circus finally left town.
When they arrived three years before, they’d been troubled with three Popes and two heretics. They were leaving with one Pope and no heretics. It all seemed most satisfactory. But what in Constance seemed merely the end of a heretic was seen in Bohemia as the making of a martyr.
And making martyrs is no way to suppress heresy. When the Czech composer Smetana wrote his suite called Má vlast, My Country, he named one section of it Tábor, a town as famous in Czech history as Hus himself. Hus’s execution stiffened resistance to papal authority. Five years after his death, some of his more extreme followers founded the town of Tábor as a fortress in which the people of God could hold out against the world, and above all against the papacy.
Life there was based on the idea that the second coming was close, the end of the world when God’s elect—and that meant primarily the people of Tábor—would go straight to heaven. In the excitement, the citizens shared all their possessions and shared in the running of the town. No book was to be read except the Bible. Every man must take his turn in the army.
Between 1420 and 1434, no less than five crusading armies were sent by the Pope against Tábor, and every one of them was defeated. Jan Žižka was the leader of Tábor’s army. He fought under the banner of the chalice, following Hus’s teaching that the wine of the mass should be received not just by the clergy, but by all the people. The chalice flies over a reconstruction of one of Žižka’s most effective devices, a sort of 15th-century tank.
He trundled his men into battle in carts like this, armed with a variety of primitive but highly effective weapons. Enemies were terrified. And soon even friends found it hard to live with a group who were so aware of being chosen by God. Taborites enjoyed slogans such as “The just will now rejoice washing their hands in the blood of the sinners.
” It’s hard to live with such people. And it was more moderate followers of Hus who finally suppressed the Taborites. An Italian cardinal came here a few years later. He reported that “This malignant race has only one good point, their love of education.
” The cardinal later became Pope as the distinguished humanist Pius II. He could appreciate learning, and he wrote, “Among the Taborites, you will find hardly one young woman who is not versed in both the Old and the New Testaments. Our Italian priests may well be ashamed of themselves, for it is certain that not one among them has once read even the New Testament. ”
Rome had a lot to learn when she tried to pull herself together after the Council of Constance.
But she chose the more exclusive learning of the Italian Renaissance. When the victor of Constance, Pope Martin, returned to Italy, it was not to Rome, but to Florence that he first came. This great city, sprawling along the green valley of the river Arno, was then only a fraction of its present size, about 50,000 people instead of half a million today. But it was the liveliest town in Europe.
Florence’s bankers had made her rich. Her artists had made her famous. Rulers from far afield borrowed their money here. And Florence’s gold coin, the florin, was the currency against which others were measured, the dollar of its day.
Tiny Florence held great kingdoms in pawn. And if Pope Martin at Constance had seemed to be firmly in the medieval past, here, better than anywhere, he could see what the future held. Florence’s artists made it clear that her rebirth, a renaissance, was already underway. Man was discovering a new image of himself and of God.
When Martin came here in 1418, Giotto was dead. But Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo would soon grow up in this same city. Florence was living evidence of a change from the old world to a new. At the cathedral, the Pope no doubt inspected Giotto’s colorful confection of a bell tower, completed 60 years before.
But he also saw beside it, still in the process of being built, a cathedral dome which was the most ambitious feat of engineering since classical times. On the walls below, the skill of the builders was celebrated, and the philosophers, teachers, and above all artists and sculptors. The many different sides to Florence’s life all came together in the building known as Orsanmichele. This was the headquarters of the various guilds, but it was also a marketplace.
The market had grown up in typically medieval fashion around a supposedly miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary. As the guilds grew richer, they provided the Virgin with a more impressive shrine. It leads the eye upwards, eventually no doubt to the creator of all wealth, but also to the more immediate source of the guilds’ prosperity: the warehouses above. One of the leading guilds was the bankers.
But though the bankers claimed the favor of the Virgin Mary, and this one’s wife reads a holy book beside the money bags, there was an element of contradiction in all this piety. Usury was considered a sin. In the popular mind, lending money on interest was like making it breed, an unholy perversion of God’s own arrangements for procreation. The richest of all the banking families became also Florence’s greatest patrons of art: the Medici.
This lavish fresco by Gozzoli, showing the procession of the three wise men, was painted to decorate the Medici private chapel. One of the riders in the procession is a portrait of the man who more than any other secured the Medici wealth: Cosimo. It was said that Cosimo de Medici was so guilty in his mind about the vast fortunes that his family had made from usury that he consulted the bank’s best customer, who happened also to be the Pope. The Pope suggested that God might look a little more kindly on the family fortunes if Cosimo would found a monastery.
It was a perfect arrangement to suit both sides. And when the Pope, Eugenius IV, moved a group of Dominicans into Florence, Cosimo did build for them this convent of San Marco. It was to be a most unusual monastery. Its corridors look normal enough, but the cells were decorated by a friar who was one of the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance, Fra Angelico.
His superb Annunciation stands at the top of the monastery stairs. The Crucifixion is in Cosimo de Medici’s own cell, to which he would retreat from time to time from the cares of the world. It was just like any other monk’s cell, except that it was twice as large. Humility has its limits.
Fra Angelico’s paintings have that sense of exuberant and yet dignified humanity which was Florence’s new discovery. Here were the open faces of Renaissance humanism. Botticelli was the painter who above all expressed the origin of Florence’s new inspiration. His virgins are even more enchantingly human than any of the Christian figures in Fra Angelico.
But their beauty and their humanity are shared by other, distinctly un-Christian characters in Botticelli’s paintings. This is Venus, the central figure in the allegorical painting of Spring, which Botticelli did for the Medici family. It was in the classics that new excitement was being found. Venus was described in Florence at the time as “a nymph of excellent comeliness, born of heaven and more than others beloved by God.
” Even fierce Mars, the god of war, could be tamed by the charms of Venus. This is a bit like coming into church, and the activity here did have something of the highest seriousness of church going. This is the library which Michelangelo designed to house the Medici collection of manuscripts. Inside, the impression of church is heightened.
The scholar slides into his pew. All these details were designed by Michelangelo. People were a bit smaller in those days. And the manuscripts were kept on this shelf under the desk.
In fact, they were chained to the desk. Instead of the book being brought to the student, the student went and sat in front of the book. The great treasures of the collection were classical texts. We think of burrowing in the classics as being a slightly dusty occupation.
This was the very opposite: a liberation, a rediscovery of the classical idea of man’s dignity. The Middle Ages had never quite dared to believe what the Bible said, that God had created man in his own image. The Renaissance reveled in that idea. As Michelangelo’s fresco of that very moment of creation shows, God is extraordinarily human, Adam confident of being almost divine.
And the act of creation, human or divine, was all of a piece. As Michelangelo himself wrote in one of his sonnets, “If my rough hammer makes a human form and carves it in the hard unyielding stone, my hand is guided, does not move alone, but follows where that other worker came. ” In Michelangelo’s series of unfinished sculptures, known as the captives, the human body seems to struggle to free itself, as if to emerge from shackles into its full perfection, and finally achieve a form which will justify the words of Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man. In form, in moving how express and admirable.
In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god. ”
While man acquired an almost divine dignity, the Holy Family was becoming more human. The Virgin Mary of Renaissance Italy has the immediate appeal of any beautiful young girl.
The Della Robbia family of sculptors dotted the walls of Florence with these colored terracotta virgins, each with everybody’s ideal of a plump and cheerful baby. Renaissance man could at last hear the laughter of the Holy Family. The same sense of cheerful celebration was perfectly captured by Luca della Robbia on the gallery which once held the choir of Florence’s cathedral. What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. What a piece of work is man! How dare they try to end this beauty?
How dare they try to end this beauty? Walking in its face, we find the purpose of peace, the beauty of life you can no longer hide. Our eyes are open. Our eyes are open.
Our eyes are open. WHY? WHY? WHY?
When Pope Martin moved on from Florence to Rome, he found the place almost derelict after years of neglect. Cows grazed in the Forum, giving its ancient splendor the look of a small market town. But the Popes over the next two centuries were to turn Rome into the most spectacular city in all Europe. The first task was a practical one, repairing the famous fountains which provided the people with drinking water.
But the people’s minds were to be dazzled as well. One of Pope Martin’s successors, a few years after Martin’s death, gave the cue for the creation of a new Rome: “To create solid and stable conviction in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye. If the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, their belief would grow. ” Mighty St.
Peter’s would not be completed for 200 years. But such buildings were perfectly designed as the Popes intended to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses. And for the cultured few, there were other delights in the private villas built for the Popes themselves. The Villa Giulia was the summer palace of Pope Julius III.
Rome was being restored to her ancient greatness. And every time the Pope sunk foundations for a new palace or a new church, they unearthed evidence of that greatness: a statue in honor of Venus commissioned by a couple in ancient Rome, the famous Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocoön. Such statues provided exciting proof that the sculptors of the Renaissance were working along the same lines as those of the ancient world. These distinctly pagan statues with their enjoyment of the human body may seem strange objects for Popes to have collected with enthusiasm.
But they suited perfectly the humanism of the Renaissance. And by the time they were dug up, there had been several humanist Popes. One of the most distinguished of them was Pius II. He had been very much a man of the world before he entered the church.
A series of paintings by Pinturicchio show highlights of his career. There was a day when he first won a place in the retinue of a great man setting off to a council. He was sent to distant Scotland as a diplomat to the court of the Scottish king. He found the daughters of the Scots eager to seduce a young Italian, and at least one succeeded.
He was sad to hear later that the son he left behind him had died as an infant. Then there was his career as an author. The emperor crowns him poet laureate, and later sends him as his ambassador to negotiate with the Pope. He was soon to be ordained a priest, and this, the world of political cardinals, was to be his future career.
Within a month or two, he was a bishop, introducing his old friend the emperor to the future empress. But a worldly bishop, a bishop who had written a saucy classical play, and a novel about two lovers. A few years later, he was a cardinal. And at the very next conclave, he was elected Pope, Pius II.
The Romans expected a lively time from such a Pope. They were to be disappointed. Pius became one of the more respectable Popes of the Renaissance. He even tried to suppress his own naughty novel, the tale of two lovers.
I read it to find out what was so shocking. And it provides a fascinating glimpse of a humanist obsessed with the classics. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it takes a great many pages to get going. But at last, the big love scene, the most risqué moment in the book: “They went into a room, where they passed so sweet a night that both said, ‘Mars and Venus could not have been better together.
‘ And sometimes, raising the blankets, he gazed at those secret parts he had not seen before, and he cried, ‘Thus, when she bathed in the spring, must Diana have appeared to Actaeon. ‘” But it only goes to show that classical literature was rather less liberating for the writers than classical sculpture for the artists. Pius was a moderate man, as Renaissance Popes went. He made only one nephew a cardinal.
But soon the papacy was to get into its stride with Pope Sixtus, who gave no less than seven of his nephews the coveted red hat. In the effigy of Sixtus, on top of his great bronze tomb in St. Peter’s, the sculptor has caught with brutal realism the rattled old Pope of whom Machiavelli wrote, “He was the first who began to show how far a Pope might go and how much, which was previously regarded as sinful, lost its iniquity when committed by a pontiff. ” But Sixtus did at least build the Sistine Chapel, which is named after him.
And if he made the most of his own family’s chances, he could also sympathize with the family problems of others. The young Cesare Borgia had had difficulties in becoming a priest because he was illegitimate. But Sixtus said, “The normal rules needn’t apply because Caesar’s father was a distinguished man, a cardinal, and at least his mother was a married woman. ”
Caesar’s father was soon himself to become Pope as Alexander VI.
He broke all previous records in papal corruption. He shamelessly bribed the other cardinals to elect him Christ’s vicar on Earth. And needing more funds for Christ’s worldly kingdom, he merely created new cardinals willing to pay him thousands of ducats each for the privilege. At the wedding feast for the Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, the papal master of ceremonies noted dryly in his diary that part of the fun was provided by 50 naked prostitutes crawling about looking for chestnuts under the furniture.
Well, that may well have been the only party of its kind that the Pope attended, but gossip makes the most of such opportunities. Soon it was being whispered that there were nightly orgies in the Vatican apartments, which Alexander had recently decorated with cupids, and with the Borgia family emblem of a bull, and of course with the papal arms. “Every evening 25 or more women, between the time of Ave and 1:00, are brought to the palace on somebody’s cropper, to such an extent that the whole palace has openly become a brothel. ”
A reaction was inevitable.
And it happened in Florence. In 1497, there were ugly rumors about. Yet another son had been born, admittedly in some secrecy, to Pope Alexander VI. In that same year, here in Florence, there was a demonstration against these corrupt times.
A long procession of boys, singing psalms, came into this square below the great town hall. And in the middle of it, they found a wooden structure piled high with all the immoral objects which the boys themselves had gone from house to house collecting. There were playing cards, dice, obscene pictures and books, women’s false hair and cosmetics, even dolls. And while they sang to God, this great pile of worldly vanities was set alight with all the excitement of righteous indignation.
It was much the same sort of thing as some people would like to see in our own lascivious age. The man behind it was a friar, Savonarola. Florence listened, mesmerized by the terrible voice prophesying God’s punishment. “All you cities of Italy, now is the time for all your sins to be punished.
Oh Italy, for your lust, your avarice, your pride, your ambition, your thieving and extortion, there will come upon you many scourges. ” Savonarola’s chief target was the Pope himself. Alexander didn’t seem to mind being accused of fornication and corruption. He was used to that.
But it was more serious when Savonarola seemed to draw the same conclusion as other reformers before him: that if a Pope was corrupt, there was no need to obey him. The Pope excommunicated this troublesome friar, but Florence paid little attention. So then the Pope threatened to seize the goods of all the Florentine merchants in Rome. And that hurt.
Support for Savonarola began to drain away in Florence. He was arrested. He was tortured. And then, in this same piazza, precisely where the vanities of the world had gone up in smoke, he was hanged with two of his friars above the flames.
The last bonfire of Savonarola’s life was his own. Many times he’d prophesied that disaster would overtake wicked Rome. Now that must have seemed a hollow prophecy. The Medici had fled from Florence during Savonarola’s reign.
They would later return and set up this rather cautionary statue overlooking the spot where Savonarola had been burnt. “First Venus ruled, then came the god of war. ” So ran a contemporary joke about the change from Alexander VI to his great rival, Pope Julius II. Julius actually marched into battle as Pope in armor.
But he loved art as much as war. It was he who laid the foundation stone for the new St. Peter’s, at the very center of which he planned to place his own tomb. It was he who first commissioned Michelangelo and Raphael to beautify the Vatican.
It was he who hired 6,000 Swiss mercenaries and persuaded Michelangelo to design the uniform which the Swiss Guards still wear. Inside the Vatican, papal policy was now built on the shifting sands of power politics. Military alliances were hurriedly made with foreign rulers and as hurriedly canceled again in favor of a better. Not long after Julius’s campaigns, a series of great frescoes were commissioned from Raphael’s workshop to give a historical basis for this style of military papacy.
This one shows the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the 4th century at which a cross appeared in the sky to the Emperor Constantine who won the battle and was converted to Christianity. The Pope who commissioned these paintings was a member of the Medici family, Clement VII. And he had himself painted as the 4th century Pope baptizing the Emperor Constantine. And finally, there was the myth on which the papacy based its claims to temporal power.
Constantine was supposed to have handed over a document much treasured in the Vatican which gave the Popes princely control over wide territories. In fact, the precious document had been proved a forgery a century before Clement commissioned this painting. But the Popes were about to be paid out for playing at soldiers. In 1527 Clement found himself a prisoner in his own castle.
He had recently changed sides once again, deserting the Emperor Charles V. Now, Rome was under attack from an Imperial army full of the new breed of heretical Germans, followers of Luther who had no love for the Pope. Clement was praying in the Vatican when the Imperial army broke through the city walls and began to sack Rome. The Pope hurried for safety along a raised way into his castle, the Castel Sant’Angelo.
A contemporary wrote, “Had he tarried for three creeds more, he would have been taken prisoner in his own palace. ” The siege of the castle must have made for sleepless nights. But at least Clement had already decorated his apartments here in the style to which a Medici and by now a pope was accustomed. To critics of Rome, the fall of the city seemed like a prophecy fulfilled.
It was 100 years now since the Taborites had defeated five successive papal armies and had predicted that Rome would be destroyed. It was 10 years since Luther had begun prophesying disaster for the city. There were Lutheran troops in the Imperial Army who’d been encouraged on the long march south precisely by the idea of slaughtering Roman priests. For years now, the whoremongering Rome of the Renaissance popes had been identified by people with the scarlet woman of the Bible, the whore of Babylon.
Some felt she was only getting what she deserved. After several weeks of violence, the city of Rome, so recently rebuilt, was largely in ruins again. But politics and diplomacy can rise above such matters. Negotiations led to the army being withdrawn from outside the castle, and soon pope and emperor found new grounds for an alliance.
The emperor would prop up the pope’s family, the Medici, in Florence. In return, the pope would show his goodwill by formally crowning Charles as emperor. A subplot later cemented the link. It was arranged that the emperor’s illegitimate daughter should marry the Pope’s son.
In the Sistine Chapel, which already housed Michelangelo’s confident image of the creation of man, a new fresco was going up, more in keeping with the times. Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment as a solemn warning after the Sack of Rome. Here are still the naked, realistic human bodies of the Renaissance, but not the languid nakedness of Michelangelo’s Adam, not the heroic nakedness of his David. Instead, the massive nakedness of this avenging Christ.
The tense nakedness of even the blessed on their way to heaven from the grave. And the utter nakedness of the damned. Michelangelo described how he was haunted while painting the Last Judgment by the voice of the dead Savonarola. Savonarola’s prophecies had now come true.
And Hamlet had come to the end of his speech. What a piece of work is a man? In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel.
In apprehension, how like a god. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.
